In my comment I originally considered writing "people want concrete answers, now"... I totally agree that for important issues more research is always needed w

In my comment I originally considered writing "people want concrete answers, now"... I totally agree that for important issues more research is always needed when one needs to resort to Bayesian analysis, but sometimes for policy reasons somebody needs to make a decision quick and they can't wait 2 more years for indisputable evidence. COVID is a good example, governments can't just say let's wait for two years and see what happens... Even for the autism example, even if authorities only find a substantial but not definite likelihood that autism is going up, they are supposed to prepare for policies that might help alleviate the problem, instead of waiting it to become a definite problem and then fixing it after the fact. For example, let's say chemical X is deemed to have 80% chance of causing increased autism, it's hard to argue we should wait until it's 99% before restricting the use of X. Of course if it turns out upon more research the likelihood is closer to 0% the policy can be reversed.